Is your Performance Max spending without converting?

Navigate to the Insights page for your PMax campaign and open the Placements report, then supplement it with the Search Terms insight and the Asset Group performance breakdown. Google populates the Placements report with Search Partner domain and app data but explicitly frames it as 'a brand safety tool, not a performance report' — meaning you see where ads ran but not conversions, clicks, or cost per placement. This is the only native visibility Google provides for PMax placements. The Performance Max Audit aggregates all three sources and reconstructs your actual channel mix — search vs shopping vs display vs YouTube vs Gmail — with spend attribution per channel.

Google deliberately restricts placement-level performance reporting for Performance Max because the campaign type is designed to abstract channel decisions away from the advertiser. Full placement reporting would let advertisers opt out of low-value channels (primarily Display and in-app inventory), which would reduce the auction pool Google monetises. What you do get — impressions by placement — is framed as brand safety rather than performance optimisation. The Performance Max Audit uses your account-level conversion data to back-calculate the approximate share of spend by channel, giving you the transparency Google withholds.

Yes, with a nuance — Search Engine Land's analysis of overlap data found PMax claims more impressions than Search in 61% of overlapping cases, but Search outperforms PMax on conversion rate (84% of the time), conversion value (85%), and CTR (65%) when both compete for the same query. PMax is given higher auction priority than Search by Google's mediation logic, so it intercepts queries your Search campaign would otherwise win. The practical result is inflated PMax performance metrics and suppressed Search performance metrics even when Search is actually the more efficient channel. The PMax Audit runs a query-overlap analysis and produces a protected-keyword list to add to your Search campaign so PMax stops intercepting high-intent traffic.

Almost certainly yes, unless you have brand exclusions active — PMax's algorithm aggressively claims branded search queries because they convert at the highest rate and boost the campaign's reported ROAS. If you run PMax without brand exclusions alongside a separate Brand Search campaign, PMax will progressively absorb the brand conversions while your Brand campaign's impression share silently drops. This inflates PMax performance metrics with demand you already owned. The PMax Audit identifies brand-term conversion share by campaign and produces the exact brand exclusion list to upload.

Performance Max does not support placement-level exclusions in the campaign settings UI — the only native options are account-level placement exclusions (which affect all campaigns including PMax), URL and mobile app exclusions submitted via your Google rep, and brand exclusion lists to block branded queries. Account-level exclusions are the most practical route for most advertisers. Requested URL/app exclusions take 3–5 business days to propagate. The PMax Audit identifies the specific apps, channels, and placements generating the most waste based on your Placements report and gives you a ready-made exclusion list formatted for account-level upload.

On overlapping queries, Search outperforms PMax on conversion rate, conversion value, and CTR in roughly 65–85% of cases per Search Engine Land's analysis — but PMax wins on reach and discovery of new audiences. The right answer is not either/or: run both, set Search keywords to Exact and Phrase match, and exclude those keywords from PMax via brand exclusions or via tightly-focused Search campaigns with higher auction priority. Running PMax alone forfeits control over your highest-intent traffic; running Search alone forfeits reach into Shopping, YouTube, and cross-channel audiences. The PMax Audit includes a channel mix recommendation based on your specific account's search vs display conversion split.

PMax's default channel mix includes the Google Display Network, which contains millions of long-tail publisher sites, mobile apps, and content farms of varying quality — the algorithm serves anywhere it can find cheap impressions that fit its modeled audience signal. Without audience signals, asset variety constraints, or placement exclusions, Display spend can reach 40–60% of a PMax budget with near-zero conversion contribution. This is why practitioners report PMax 'showing on scam display websites'. The PMax Audit surfaces your Display spend share, lists the specific sites and apps absorbing the most budget, and flags the ones with zero conversions attributed.

Anecdotal practitioner reports place remarketing share at roughly 50–70% of PMax conversions in established accounts, driven by the algorithm prioritising the highest-converting signals — which are almost always your existing site visitors. This creates the illusion of strong new-customer acquisition when you are actually paying to re-engage existing audiences. If you are not tracking new vs returning customer conversions separately, your reported PMax performance is inflated by retention that organic search, email, or direct traffic would have captured anyway. The PMax Audit estimates your remarketing share by cross-referencing conversion audience data and recommends the New Customer Acquisition goal setting to force prospecting behaviour.

The Algorithm Control Index (ACI) is a 0–100 score measuring how much strategic control you retain over a Performance Max campaign versus how much is delegated to Google's automation. A score of 100 means the algorithm has full control — minimal audience signals, low asset variety, no exclusions, no New Customer Acquisition goal. A score near 0 means strong audience signals, comprehensive asset coverage, placement exclusions, and brand exclusions active. The PMax Audit calculates your ACI from your actual campaign configuration and specifies which configuration changes would most improve it.

The Exploration Efficiency Ratio (EER) measures whether the algorithm's learning spend is finding real value or burning money. It compares conversions generated during the campaign's exploration phase against the spend consumed, benchmarked against your account's average CPA. An EER above 1.0 means exploration is profitable relative to baseline; below 0.5 means the campaign is in a learning loop — spending significantly to find signal it is not converting. The PMax Audit flags campaigns with EER below 0.5 as candidates for restructuring and calculates how much of your 30-day spend was consumed by unproductive exploration.

Yes, with one mandatory configuration: set Search campaigns to Exact or Phrase match on your highest-value keywords so they are prioritised over PMax in the auction. Without this, PMax will cannibalise your Search traffic because Google's mediation gives PMax higher priority on overlapping queries. A valid structure is: tightly-scoped Search campaigns on your proven converting terms, PMax for discovery and Shopping, Brand Search isolated with exclusions in PMax. The PMax Audit includes a cannibalisation analysis showing exact query overlap between your PMax campaign and existing Search campaigns, with a recommended keyword protection list.

You cannot run a clean brand incrementality geo test while PMax is active, because Google does not let you exclude branded queries from PMax on a per-geo basis — the test is contaminated from the start. The only valid approaches are: (1) pause PMax entirely during the test window, (2) apply account-wide brand exclusions to PMax before the test, or (3) accept the contamination and widen your confidence intervals accordingly. This is a structural measurement gap that Google's product team has acknowledged but not fixed. The PMax Audit flags this limitation and recommends whichever test design is feasible given your revenue sensitivity to pausing PMax.